President Volodymyr Zelenskyy signed a law today that removes Russian’s status as a protected language in Ukraine, where it remains the primary language of a portion of the population despite a decline recorded since the Russian invasion began.
“The President of Ukraine has signed the law, an important decision for the protection of the Ukrainian linguistic space and the fulfillment of our European obligations,” said Parliament Speaker Ruslan Stefanchuk in a Facebook post.
“The language of an aggressor state cannot benefit from protection tools designed to support the languages of indigenous peoples and national communities,” he stated, invoking “the justice and security of the language in Ukraine.”
This law strips the Russian language of the protections provided by the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, a Council of Europe treaty that Ukraine had ratified.
This measure does not make the Russian language illegal in Ukraine, but the state is no longer required to provide public services in Russian and may restrict education in that language.
According to official data, about one-third of the Ukrainian population spoke Russian as their primary language before the war, mainly in eastern and southern Ukraine.
According to polls, the use of the Russian language declined after the start of the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, but the linguistic situation is complicated by the fact that Russia occupies 19% of the territory.
Tensions regarding the status of the Russian language were one of the reasons cited by the Moscow-backed separatist uprising in eastern Ukraine in 2014.
